Feature stories

With current space travel limited to just a few robotic probes visiting nearby planets, how realistic is it to think about reaching the nearest stars? For the short term, not very – especially when we speak of manned missions. ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two scientists from the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris have built a computer model that simulates the atmosphere on Titan, one of Saturn’s sixty two moons, and as a result now ...

Scientists from Spectrolab, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, have recently published their research on the fabrication of solar cells that surpass the 40% efficiency milestone—the highest efficiency achieved for any photovoltaic ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A prototype robot spy "ornithopter," the Nano-Hummingbird, has successfully completed flight trials in California. Developed by the company AeroVironment Inc., the miniature spybot looks like a hummingbird ...

(Phys.org) —The quintessential feature of a black hole is its "point of no return," or what is more technically called its event horizon. When anything—a star, a particle, or wayward human—crosses this horizon, the ...

Dennis Siegel, a student at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany has built what he calls an electromagnetic harvester—it converts electromagnetic fields in the immediate environment into electricity to recharge ...

(Phys.org)—When biologist Anthony Cashmore claims that the concept of free will is an illusion, he's not breaking any new ground. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how humans seem to have ...

(Phys.org) —These days, getting a Ph.D. is probably the last thing you want to do if you are out to revolutionize the world. If, however, what you propose is an idea, rather than a technology, it can still be a valuable ...

Thane Heins knows the track record of inventors that claim to make breakthroughs in power generation methods, especially when they claim to defy the second law of thermodynamics. Every so often, a (usually untrained) scientist ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- With its complete lack of atoms, a vacuum is often considered to be the best known insulator. For this reason, vacuums are regularly used to reduce heat transfer, such as in the lining of a thermos to keep ...

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Vietnam and Australia has found that introducing a strain of bacteria known to infect mosquitoes in the wild was more effective in reducing dengue infections than ...

A team at the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has announced that it will be putting a contraception gel it has developed into trials starting this April. The trials will involve more than 400 couples ...

An international team of researchers has found that cancer cells that escape from senescence due to use of chemotherapy have an enhanced capacity to drive tumor growth. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the ...

It was a good year for medical research as a team at the German center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Magdeburg, found that dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain. Any exercise helps, the team found, but dancing ...

A team of researchers with members from the U.S., Australia and Switzerland has found that male and female humans are evolving in slightly different ways. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of ...

News from Toyota: On Tuesday the car marker announced it has a heat-resistant magnet that uses significantly less neodymium, a rare-earth element—reducing the amount of neodymium use by up to 50 percent.

A display that can fly and be controlled by your eyes: Can the idea fly its way into a product of the future? Think drone with display that can detect a person's face, pupils, hand gestures and position.

Computer Science and Engineering Professor Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University has taken a serious look at the robots of Star Wars fame and judges how realistic they are in a recent Science Robotics Focus piece—in it, ...